What does it mean to pursue critical scholarship in the
humanities and social sciences in a settler colonial society trying to move
beyond the category "settler" and "native" towards becoming
the citizenry bequeathed to us by our political settlement?
This is the question all South African universities share,
however differently they were marked by apartheid. Its urgency is fuelled
partly by the daunting demographic anxiety the humanities and social sciences
face because of declining enrolment and the very worrying reality that we do
not produce enough graduate students, particularly black South African PhD graduates.
These realities are made clear by two major reports
published in 2011, one by the Academy of Science of South Africa, the other by
a ministerial task team under the leadership of Ari Sitas and Sara Mosoetsa.
It is not South Africa alone that faces these challenges.
The difficulties involved in being and deciding to become a humanities scholar
and student are global in nature. In the post-colonial world, we are faced not
only with the imperatives of narrowly defined "development", but also,
the global North's market instrumentalism in an era of market fundamentalism
and economic recession.
In this country, though, have we really confronted as
scholars what the apartheid inheritance might mean? In a talk he gave in 2011
on satire and law, Judge Albie Sachs referred to a posture of critique that he
described as "discomfort".
I have been thinking about how many of us voluntarily put
ourselves in a position of discomfort in this sense. If we are to think of our
inheritance as a history of privilege rather than subjection, or as a colonial
genealogy of liberalism, paternalism and Eurocentrism, then how do we deal with
the discomfort when others name us as such?
Do we go there voluntarily, to this place of discomfort, or
do we, as Sachs suggested, sometimes have to be nudged?
With our legacy, my question is: As humanities scholars,
should we not be leading the critique of that inheritance of, on the one hand,
the stubborn traces of "Bantu studies" and, on the other, a
Eurocentrism that has still to realise that it is not universal but
particular?
Let me add a point of clarity: no race or ethnicity has the
mono-poly on Eurocentrism in this country. In fact, Eurocentrism might be one
of the few things that most South Africans actually share. Our Afrophobia has
shown that quite well.
But there are scholars who seem to view any effort to
address the legacy of Bantu studies or Eurocentrism as an immediate recourse to
nativism. They see the need to hit the panic button of academic freedom to
rescue us from ourselves when we talk about curriculum transformation in
relation to Eurocentrism or apartheid.
In its most provocative formulation, my good colleague John
Higgins, an esteemed professor of literature at the University of Cape Town,
described one very important project to undo our inheritance, namely, some
discussions that led to the Sitas/Mosoetsa team's "humanities
charter", as a dangerous call for us to participate in "applied
nationalism" ("The dilemma of the humanities", Mail &
Guardian, June 24 2011).
No less than a founding father of post-colonial theory has
been mobilised to settle the point conclusively — namely Edward Said — and
particularly the TB Davie Memorial Lecture he gave at the University of Cape
Town in 1991.
But it strikes me as more than a minor misreading of Said to
think he is a persuasive hammer with which to smash nationalism in the colonial
world, even if we qualify it as "applied". I suppose you can do that
if you leave out the very real ambivalence, tension and subtlety that marked
Said's Davie lecture, as it does his writing on nationalism more generally. But
to leave that out surely goes against the grain of the literary criticism he so
championed as a teacher, that of putting a text in context?
In that lecture, Said's starting point was a discussion of
the "canon wars" that marked the humanities in the United States. He
was clear that the US academy could not stay the way it was: it had to open
itself up to other cultures, as he put it, and other traditions of thought and
writing.
But he was issuing a warning, not about the dangers of
leaving the canon untouched to protect the classics, as it were, but about the
dangers of constituting those other, now newly valorised cultures and
traditions and about what would happen if they became the new closed orthodoxy
rather than subversive points of opening and connection. He made this point
with an account of the lacklustre places that Arab universities have become.
It is curious to me why those who see Said only as a harsh
critic of nationalism seem to recoil from that other Said, with his role in the
Palestinian national liberation movement. How then do we make sense of Said's
views on nationalism?
I suggest the clue lies in the distinction Frantz Fanon makes
between "nationalism" and "national consciousness". It lies
in the Fanon who said: "It is national liberation which leads the nation
to play its part on the stage of world history. It is at the heart of national
consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this
twofold emerging is ultimately the source of all culture. "National
consciousness, which is not nationalism," he emphasises, "is the only
thing that will give us an international dimension."
It is in Fanon's reading of national consciousness as a
twofold process that rearranges the derangement that colonialism performs on
the native that Said finds his argument: to be simultaneously for a process of
national liberation yet simultaneously aware of and alert to its pitfalls.
But the pitfalls for Fanon and later for Said do not allow
us to escape the problem that national consciousness is the answer to, namely
the colonial problem or what we might call "the native question".
To make sense of Said being critical of nationalism, but for
national liberation and for decolonisation, it is important to take note of
what was at stake for him. Decolonisation was not for him about identity
politics, about valorising Arab studies or African studies in and of
themselves. Rather, it was about justice, as it also was for Fanon.
The pitfalls of identity politics, as both saw it, do not
then remove the very real question of justice that remains with regard to the
colonial question. The devalorisation of native thought, its debasement and
dismissal, is in the first instance, then, a wrong that must be righted.
The pitfalls arise when the righting of the wrong inflicts
its own injustice on others, when one identity trumps others, when justice
simply means turning the picture upside down, so that those at the bottom now
stand above those at the top.
It was this danger that Said was alerting us to.
So, hitting the panic button of academic freedom will not
save us in the humanities and social sciences from the discomfort of having to
confront the problem of justice in our society. I mean "justice" here
to include undoing the devalorisation of intellectuals, of thought, of
knowledge and aesthetics outside the Western tradition as constituted in the
modern disciplines around which the university is structured. Here I am
referring to those devalorised traditions of thought and intellectuals not only
in Africa, but also in most of the world, in the Middle East, South Asia, South
East Asia and Latin America.
A cursory glance at the limited expertise in our humanities
and social sciences bears testimony to this devalorisation. Although we rightly
try to undo the Euro-American hegemony by making Africa a focus, let us not end
there. I have learnt through my participation in the Council for the Development
of Social Science Research in Africa over the past decade, from those who have
been through these debates a long while before us and have much to teach us,
that we need to have in our midst scholars who also study areas and issues
outside Africa and the Euro-American sphere, so that we can learn to ask the
questions that matter to us, as we learn from the questions that matter to
them.
That is, we need scholars who can tell us about concept of
Shi in the propensity of things in Chinese philosophical thought in the Middle
Kingdom, or illuminate the aesthetics of great modernist figures such as the
painter MF Hussain or the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in India, or help us to navigate
Iranian cinema before and after the revolution, or provoke us to re-theorise
the distinction between the secular and sacred, through understanding Candomblé
as practised by the povo do santo (people of the saint) in Brazil.
We also need scholars who can tell us about the organisation
of political authority in the Funj dynasty in Sudan or the Sekoto Caliphate in
Northern Nigeria, or the Rajput relations with the East India Company in India,
not simply because of a historical and anthropological curiosity about pasts
forgotten or cultures obscured, but because, as scholars have been pointing out
recently, those accounts are actually central to understanding the emergence of
modern thought and concepts that govern our present ways of thinking.
It is not about saying: "They have their philosophers,
so let's show them that we have our philosophers too." It is about
disrupting the autobiography of how the West tells its story about itself and
it is about producing a less imperial, more democratic and inevitably more
violent version of how we arrived at our modernity.
As scholars, we should lead the critique of the humanities
and social sciences we have inherited by pointing to its limitations.
Without this self-critique, renewal will not happen and
without renewal the humanities and social sciences in post-apartheid South
Africa will continue to be less and less compelling for our students and held
in more and more suspicion by our political elites.
If the fate of the humanities and social sciences in this
country becomes a Chronicle of a Death Foretold, then it will be a story
authored not only by the market, but also, in no small measure, by us.
